Architecture studio Space Popular has teamed up with Sir John Soane's Museum in London to create an exhibition that looks at "the magics and mechanics" of virtual travel.
The exhibition, called Space Popular: The Portal Galleries, opens in June 2022 and will present a history of portals in fiction, as well as studies of physical portals in the museum itself and a virtual reality portal.
Space Popular is offering a teaser of the exhibition today as part of its guest editorship for Dezeen 15, a digital festival celebrating Dezeen's 15th birthday.
As part of the festival the studio's takeover, founders Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg are talking to Dezeen's editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs in a live interview about the increasingly important role of textiles in virtual spaces, which was the focus of a manifesto written by the duo. A virtual reality portal by Space Popular
Space Popular has worked with the museum on the exhibition since 2018, and the design and layout of the space informed the studio's approach to the project.
"Our understanding of virtual space finds its precedents well before any form of electronic media, going back all the way to frescoes and tapestries," Lesmes and Hellberg told Dezeen.
"We see the Soane as a device that enables the virtual experience of space, not only because of the objects we can find there but how they are contained and displayed," it added.
"Folding walls, reflections, or thresholds full of artefact...